Spring Break

After a Five-Year Marriage, One of Hollywood's Best-Looking Couples, John Stamos and Rebecca Romijn-Stamos, Become X-Mates

They made a beautiful couple, but beauty, as they say, is fleeting. After a 5½-year marriage, Rebecca Romijn-Stamos and John Stamos announced on April 12 that they were amicably calling it quits. The couple's relationship had been in trouble before. "Last year there was a bad time," Stamos admitted to PEOPLE in December. "But we put our foot down and decided to work at it and spend more time together."

Not enough, as it turns out. A source close to the couple says, "They grew apart, like every other couple. They spent less and less time together." Romijn-Stamos, 31, lives in Los Angeles and has spent recent years on location filming the X-Men blockbusters as well as the April releases The Punisher and Godsend, while Stamos, 40, has been living in New York City while starring on Broadway and shooting an untitled sitcom pilot for ABC. "There's no third party involved," says their rep. The source says Stamos doesn't have a permanent residence right now.

That's a shame, because together the pair renovated their dream house on a 20-acre ranch outside L.A.—a restored former bordello built in the 1920s—that Romijn-Stamos plans to keep. "We chase each other around the house like goof-balls," she said in 1999. Among the furnishings was something Stamos picked up for $30,000 on eBay: a 13½-ft.-high galvanized steel Disneyland entrance sign, a memento of their first date at the California theme park after they met backstage in New York City at a 1994 fashion show for Victoria's Secret, where she has worked as a model. They got engaged after Stamos presented her with a 1930s platinum 4-carat Boucheron diamond engagement ring in bed at their home in the Malibu Mountains at midnight on Christmas Eve 1997. They remain on friendly terms, though "it's sad and it's painful," Romijn-Stamos told Jay Leno on April 13. "I'm still trying to get my head around it."